In a few short years, the trepidation of moving business services and storage into the cloud has been replaced by the challenge of finding the right provider to meet your needs. That, and selecting niche offerings per department, scaling for the size of the organisation, as well as security and data challenges that come with the shift to the cloud.

While cloud adoption was initially masked by connectivity issues and the need to change mindsets to accept software as a service (SaaS), the current drive is finding and building the ultimate cloud architecture for a business' particular needs. In many cases, this might involve building a multiple-cloud solution, but this represents a new set of challenges and required skills for IT professionals - introducing additional business risks for the CIO. So, why would a business engage so many cloud providers? Simply put, a business might adopt a cloud offering to achieve a certain set of business tasks. Before long, the business outgrows this offering, or realises a benefit of moving other divisions into the cloud and they quickly adopt offerings for finance, marketing, operations, etc, until they have created a multi-cloud solution (or problem) for the business.

When properly managed, using multiple cloud providers allows a business to mitigate its risks of data loss, security breaches and downtime by dividing the load between providers. It also allows businesses to take advantage of public and private cloud offerings. In this eBook, Internet Solutions looks at best case practice for managing a multi-cloud solution, and explores the need to efficiently monitor and manage your cloud solutions.